Kent Haruf Quotes

This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.

The evening wasn't cold yet... But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.

Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.

I think that usually the risk in trying to write children in fiction is the tendency to make them too cute or something.

That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her. And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plains of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards.

I don't imagine I'll ever get over missing him, Raymond said. Some things you don't get over. I believe this'll be one of them.

And so we know the satisfaction of hate. We know the sweet joy of revenge. How it feels good to get even. Oh, that was a nice idea Jesus had. That was a pretty notion, but you can't love people who do evil. It's neither sensible or practical. It's not wise to the world to love people who do such terrible wrong. There is no way on earth we can love our enemies. They'll only do wickedness and hatefulness again. And worse, they'll think they can get away with this wickedness and evil, because they'll think we're weak and afraid. What would the world come to?

But I want to say to you here on this hot July morning in Holt, what if Jesus wasn't kidding? What if he wasn't talking about some never-never land? What if he really did mean what he said two thousand years ago? What if he was thoroughly wise to the world and knew firsthand cruelty and wickedness and evil and hate? Knew it all so well from personal firsthand experience? And what if in spite of all that he knew, he still said love your enemies? Turn your cheek. Pray for those who misuse you. What if he meant every word of what he said? What then would the world come to?

And what if we tried it? What if we said to our enemies: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. We can kill your children. We can make ruins of your cities and villages and when we're finished you won't even know how to look for the places where they used to be. We have the power to take away your water and to scor

You are still in love with her. No. But I think I'm in love a little with the memory of her.

You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.

You can't fix things, can you, Louis said.
We always want to. But we can't.

I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.

I heard he was disciplined by the church for supporting some other preacher who came out homosexual in Denver. I believe it was something of that nature.

You have been good for me. What more could anyone ask for? I'm a better person than I was before we got together. That's your doing.

I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

We'd do better to follow the admonition of Jesus about loving our neighbours. People in the U.S. are capable of forgiveness and willing to see one another's point of view, but when matters become politicised, we're less able to do that.

Oh, I know it sounds crazy, she said. I suppose it is crazy. I don't know. I don't even care. But that girl needs somebody and I'm ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you - she smiled at them - you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It's too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.

I'm attempting to broaden my novels' scope through landscape and weather, leaves falling off trees, overnight storms, timeless elements which, irrespective of human endeavour, have always been there and, as long as there is life and snow, will always be there.

People do. But, Daddy, it's not right. I didn't know you even cared for Addie Moore. Or even knew her that well. You're right. I didn't. But that's the main point of this being a good time. Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you're not just all dried up after all. It just seems embarrassing. To whom? It's not to me. But people know about you. Of course they do. And I don't give a damn. Who told you? It must've been one of your tightass friends in town here. It was Linda Rogers. She would. Well, she thought I should know. And now you do.

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.

Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are.

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

Sins of omission, Louis said.
You don't believe in sins.
I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That's a sin.

Love is the most important part of life, isn't it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don't understand and forgive what you don't know or don't like. Love is all. Love is patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering. I hope you may love each other all your days of life together. And I hope you may have a great many years of those days.

Yes. He told me things. Like what for instance? Like once he said I had beautiful eyes. He said my eyes were like black diamonds lit up on a starry night. They are, honey. But nobody ever told me. No, Maggie said. They never do.

This don't look like no Sunday school church meeting to me.

People in their houses at night. These ordinary lives. Passing without their knowing it. Bid hoped to recapture something.
The officer stared at him.
The precious ordinary.

I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.

The precious ordinary. I

So life hasn't turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected,' he said.
'Except it feels good now, at this moment.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

Addie Moore had a grandson named Jamie who was just turning six. In the early summer the trouble between his parents got worse. There were bad arguments in the kitchen and bedroom, accusations and recriminations, her tears and his shouts. They finally separated on a trial basis and she went off to California to stay with a friend, leaving Jamie with his father. He called Addie and told her what happened, that his wife had quit her job as a hairdresser and had gone out to the West Coast.

Fame isn't healthy for a writer.

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.

My desire is to be anonymous, isolated, quiet, peaceful, and concentrated.

Our Souls at Night open onto larger insights about getting older?

Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.

It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.

A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.

Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. I would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I'm so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it.

I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It's a strange life. I don't know how long it'll go on. I don't look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales.

Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we'd still have something like this. That it turns out we're not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.

This country's crazy in terms of fame and what people think it means. They expect a writer to be something between a Hollywood starlet and the village idiot.